Hey. So I read your response and your comments on Twitter. I’m not really sure where to begin. I guess first I should say, I appreciate that you took the time to voice your opinion. I also appreciate and acknowledge that you have differing experiences than I do when it comes to building systems, products, leading teams, working at companies, etc.

Even still, I’m not really sure how to respond. I think this is the first time someone has been vocal in such a manner about anything I’ve written or said. I’m sorry if my response ends up being non-satisfactory or doesn’t address your comments. I just spent the last 30 days fasting for Ramadan and I’m a little mentally and physically exhausted from the experience. I guess the other thing is that I just don’t really know how to deal with such negativity thrown at me. It’s a little jarring.

My experiences with microservices are from my time at Hailo. We moved to a microservices architecture from what you could call something of a monolithic system that evolved into complex SOA. The re-architecture allowed us to build something truly powerful. By the time I left we had over 200 bespoke services running in production. The migration path was not simple, and just like your experience it was 1–2 years of work to do that. For us it was microservices in the truest sense of the word. I think there’s a certain disbelief when you talk about being able to put a new service into production in less than a couple weeks but hey it would happen. We took microservices to an extreme. I like to think of it as “everything as a service” where even infrastructure was managed by microservices.

It’s funny that you mention “oldschool Enterprise Service Bus”. Microservices are essentially an event driven architecture and one of the key elements of the system as publishing events for any state change that we cared about. It essentially allows any other services that care about that data to consume it and store it in the manner it cares about. We were a logistics company right, so you can imagine consuming gps data in a number of ways. Maybe in one way to locate nearby drivers but in another to map traffic patterns in real time. I guess these concepts are nothing new, event sourcing is the term we’re using nowadays right?

A lot of what I wrote is based on my personal experiences. It was high level post and yes I left out quite a lot of details on the downsides of self organising, silos and that glaring hole you mention, “data”. Because honestly I was delirious from fasting, had written a shit ton and just wanted to get the post out there.

If you want to get down to it. Yes if you’re building services that have to affect the mobile apps then it’s going to take a lot longer to do that. Yes there is a requirement for cross team collaboration. I think you fixated quite a lot of the idea of self organising teams but it’s my mistake for leaving out the specifics of how and when that’s going to be effective.

Your words on Twitter before you deleted them:

I mean what do I say to that? That just hurts. Blind adopter? Con artist? Evangelist? Have we ever met? Have you actually met me? Have you ever worked with me? Wtf.

I can feel myself basically about to shift into a rant and to be honest, I’m really just too tired to do it. I’m sorry that my post came across as bullshit being shilled out by a blind adopter evangelist turned con artist. I’m sorry that I couldn’t provide more thoughtful feedback to your rant.

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